The automation of IT and software development is accelerating at a rapid pace, helping companies bring new products and ideas to market faster and more efficiently, CIOs and technology executives say.
Automation has been a factor in the tech world for some time, but it is accelerating thanks to the availability of languages such as Java, as well as new platforms and tools. A six-month-old startup called Ansible Works Inc. raised $6 mllion from Menlo Ventures and other investors, VentureWire said on Tuesday. The company, with total funding of $7 million, 'automates onerous IT tasks such as upgrading large groups of servers with new software,' VentureWire reported. Co-founder and CEO Said Ziouani explained that the idea is to put powerful software development tools in the hands of more people, not just programmers. He also told VentureWire that the company's software reduces security risks since it 'touches the servers through a secure Internet protocol rather than software agents.'
Security also appears to be a factor in the National Security Agency's decision to eliminate 90% of its network administrators and employ more automation in the wake of revelations by Edward Snowden.
In recent months, companies from LinkedIn Inc. to Shutterstock Inc., a marketplace for digital images, have talked about how continuous software development, facilitated by automation, has raised their level of innovation and their ability to get products to market more quickly. Shutterstock which had a successful IPO in October 2012 that turned founder Jon Oringer into a billionaire, issues about 700 software updates a month.
'We do push a lot of code,' Chris Fischer, vice president of technology operations, told CIO Journal last year. 'Because it's open source, we can automate and move very rapidly and not be tied to a longer process that would often be required with other, standard vendors,' Fischer said.
Ford Motor Co. is making greater use of automation of software development and IT, and that is having a big impact on the business, Vijay Sankaran, chief technology director, told CIO Journal. 'Automation plays a huge role. A lot of things that were previously done manually are now being created in a repeatable and automated way,' he said. Automation is streamlining the testing of new IT systems, reducing the time required to complete that work by about one third, he said.
'With languages like Java, we are able to automate many processes. And people who are not developers can use tools like IBM's Lombardi to create programs,' he said. Lombardi is used to model business processes.
Automation is also leading to faster prototyping of IT systems, eliminating the need to make a list of what programmers think the folks in the business unit want, then writing code, sharing the results with the business unit and going back to make adjustments. New visualization tools now make it possible for IT people to meet with business leaders and experiment with software design in real time. Mr. Sankaran said those tools have been used to speed up prototypes for dealer ordering and warranty management systems, reducing time to market to a few weeks or months, instead of half a year. 'We are building prototypes in real time with car dealers,' he said.
Mark Kocour, associate principal of global IT with ZS Associates Inc., which provides sales technology and consulting for companies in pharmaceutical, manufacturing and other markets, said he began using software to automate disaster recovery capabilities in remote facilities last year. If ZS' primary data center experiences an outage in a sales management application, VMware Inc.'s vCenter Site Recovery Manager instantly replicates the software in a secondary data center. Recovery Manager also automatically documents all of the steps taken to replicate the software, which is important for pharmaceutical customers that set limits on how quickly a service must be restored. Previously, two engineers had to manually restart a disrupted app, test it, and document steps taken during the outage to restart the application. 'It allows us to keep documentation up to date without manual intervention,' Mr. Kocour said. 'It's very valuable.'
Brian Lillie, CIO of data center host Equinix Inc., said his application developers use a few tools to automate software testing, reducing by several hours the time it takes to check code line by line, as well as the human error associated with repetitive manual processes.
He said software from Electric Cloud Inc. helps his developers automate scripting of packaged software, as well as 'gigantic' builds of custom applications. Electric Cloud is used by Equinix developers in Singapore, the U.S. and India. He said the main problem Electric Cloud solves is repeatability, the ability to replicate code as it
migrates from development to test to production environments. 'Even the best [developer] can skip or miss a step,' he said.
IT自动化和软件开发正在加速以快速的步伐，帮助企业带来新的产品和理念推向市场更快，更高效，CIO和技术高管表示。
自动化一直在高科技世界的一个因素了一段时间，但它正在加速得益于语言，如Java的可用性，以及新的平台和工具。阿六个月大的启动称为Ansible工程公司从门罗风险投资公司及其他投资者募集6美元mllion，VentureWire周二表示。该公司与700万美元的资金总额，“自动完成繁重的IT任务，如升级大集团与新的软件的服务器，”VentureWire报道。联合创始人兼CEO齐瓦尼解释说，这个想法是把强大的软件开发工具，在更多人的手里，而不仅仅是程序员。他还告诉VentureWire，该公司的软件，降低安全风险，因为它是通过一个安全的互联网协议，而不是软件代理接触到的服务器。“”
安全性也似乎是在国家安全局的决定，以消除其90％的网络管理员和由爱德华·斯诺登采用更自动化的启示之后的一个因素。
近几个月来，公司从LinkedIn公司向其他Shutterstock公司，为数码影像市场中，都谈到如何持续的软件开发，以促进自动化，提高了创新，他们把产品更快地推向市场能力的水平。其他Shutterstock其中有一个成功的IPO在2012年10月，结果却创始人乔恩Oringer成了亿万富翁，问题约700软件更新一个月。 “我们做推了很多代码，”克里斯·菲舍尔，技术运营副总裁，首席信息官告诉中国的最后一年。 “因为它是开源的，我们可以自动化和移动非常迅速，不绑，将经常需要与其他标准的厂商一个较长的过程，”菲舍尔说。
福特汽车公司正在更多地使用软件开发和IT的自动化，并正在对业务有很大的影响，维杰桑卡兰，首席技术总监告诉CIO杂志。 “自动化起着巨大的作用。很多先前手工完成的事情现在正在一个可重复的和自动化的方式建立的，自动化简化新IT系统的测试，减少了约三分之一，以完成这项工作所需的时间，随着像Java语言中，我们可以自动执行许多进程。和人谁不开发人员可以使用像IBM的隆巴迪工具来创建程序。”
自动化也导致了IT系统的快速原型设计，无需做什么程序员认为人在业务部门希望有一个列表，然后编写代码，与业务单位共享成果，并回去进行调整。新的可视化工具，现在有可能使IT人员与商界领袖和实验软件的设计满足实时性。桑卡兰先生说，这些工具已经被用于加快原型经销商订货和保修管理系统，缩短产品上市时间至数周或数月，而不是半年。 他表示“我们正在建立原型实时地与汽车经销商。”
马克KOCOUR，全球IT与ZS Associates公司，它提供的销售技术和公司在医药，制造等市场咨询副校长说，他开始利用软件在去年实现自动化远程设备的灾难恢复能力。如果ZS'主数据中心出现中断在销售管理中的应用，VMware公司的vCenter站点恢复管理器瞬间复制软件在辅助数据中心。恢复管理器还可以自动记录所有的复制软件，这是制药的客户，设置一个服务的速度有多快，必须恢复重要的限制所采取的步骤。此前，两位工程师必须手动重新启动中断的应用程序，测试它，并在中断期间重新启动应用程序文件采取的步骤。 “这使我们能够保持文档为最新，无需人工干预，”KOCOUR先生说。 “这是非常有价值的。” 布赖恩·莉莉，数据中心主机Equinix公司公司的首席信息官，他说应用程序开发人员使用一些工具来自动化软件测试，几个小时减少花费一行来检查代码行的时间，以及与重复的手工操作相关的人为错误流程。
他表示从电云公司的软件可以帮助他开发自动化套装软件的脚本，还有“巨大的”建立自定义应用程序。电云在新加坡，美国和印度使用Equinix公司开发。主要问题电力云解决是可重复性，复制代码，因为它从开发迁移到测试到生产环境的能力。 即使是最好的[开发]可以跳过或错过了一步。